Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

Two women arrive in a Spanish village, a dreamlike place caught between the desert and the ocean, seeking medical advice and salvation. One suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective, struggling to understand her mother’s illness. Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity.